


After? There is No 'After'

by Unrepentant_Marvelite



Category: X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - 1960s, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Canon Jewish Character, Erik Logic Is The Best Logic, Historical References, Hurt Erik Lehnsherr, Israel, M/M, Nazis, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Smoking, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-14
Updated: 2018-05-14
Packaged: 2019-05-07 01:43:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,436
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14660727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unrepentant_Marvelite/pseuds/Unrepentant_Marvelite
Summary: Erik knows what he is for. He has known his responsibilities as a survivor since the moment he woke under a scratchy, lice-infested blanket in the Red Army hospital. His world is painted in lucid blacks and whites (so often splashed in red) and there is no room for uncertainty or indecision... until a certain sunburned Englishman throws himself into his world.





	After? There is No 'After'

**Author's Note:**

> All characters and rights belong to Marvel. This piece occurs in the same universe as "A Woman Always Knows" but can be read as a stand-alone.

“You again,” Erik greets him as he opens the door. The funny, little Englishman smiles, laughter in his eyes and, before Erik can shut him out in the hall, he has slid his way into the flat.

“Yes! Me, again.” He settles on a chair. It is plain, wooden with iron-alloy nails and not by any imagination inviting or meant to be sat on for any period time. It is functional, spartan and one of the few pieces of furniture Erik owns at the moment. Xavier settles on it like it’s a damn cushioned throne. He continues to smile at Erik.

“Don’t you have other people to bother?” Erik crosses his arms and scowls at him.

“Not really, no. You’re the only one I know, here, Erik.”

His accent is terrible, almost unintelligible. It grates on his ears to hear the man speak Hebrew but Erik is too tired today to try switching to English.

“Haven’t you any friends at that hospital of yours?” he asks as he marches back into the kitchen. He stirs the lentil soup on the burner and takes out more of the leftover lamb from the refrigerator to add. Xavier will no doubt wheedle his way into sharing his supper.

“None whose company I would prefer over yours, my friend,” and he winks when Erik rolls his eyes.

“I am not your friend,” he murmurs into the bubbling pot. Xavier does not (or, more likely, chooses to not) hear him. Instead he picks up one of the French-language newspapers on the table that Erik has delivered from abroad and begins reading aloud, adding his own commentary to the world events. (His French, at least, is far better than his Hebrew.) He seems content to amuse himself this way until Erik puts a steaming bowl of soup and a bottle of mediocre wine on the table in front of him. He gushes over them, feigning surprise that Erik would include him (“—really, I didn’t mean to impose!”) as though it was not expected from the beginning.

Erik doesn’t dignify his protests with a response and eats his supper without a word while Xavier chatters on.

When they finish, Xavier tidies the kitchen as though he doesn’t know Erik will only have to do it again (properly) later. He is quiet for the first time that evening when they later stand on the little balcony outside and smoke.

Erik watches him out of the corner of his eye. Xavier breathes in the night air and stands relaxed in the twilight descending around him. Every man has his masks and it is in unguarded moments like these that Erik pays attention, always looking for a crack to glimpse the monster inside.

He still cannot fathom why Xavier persists in hanging around.

“Why the hell do you keep coming here, Xavier?”

The man’s mouth twitches into a smile.

“Because you make a lentil soup that makes me empathize with Esau, my friend.”

“You’re a fool,” says Erik as he pitches the butt over the railing. The ember glows all the way down to the street below.

“Why do you say that?” He’s standing now, back relaxed against the railing, as though he has every right to feel safe in the growing darkness. He is vulnerable, open, defenseless and still bloody _smiling_ like he hasn’t a care in the world. It makes the blood run hot under Erik’s skin to see such naïveté.

Fast, faster than Xavier can follow, he steps up between the splay of his legs. Close, so close that he can see the man’s pulse beat in his neck, he grips him tight under the arm. He hears Xavier’s breath catch short. Watches his hands clench against the railing. Sees him bite his lip.

“Do you know,” Erik hisses into his ear, “how easy it would be for me to be rid of you? A little too much to drink, I think, constable. He only stepped out for a moment, said he needed a smoke and then… a horrible accident, to be sure.”

Xavier’s breath is ragged now. His eyes are too blue, too luminous in this darkness by some trick of the city lights. His hand is curling around one of the belt loops of Erik’s trousers. Slow and subtle, like a sneaking serpent.

“I’m not afraid of you, Erik,” he says in a low voice, pitched in a way that makes Erik’s grip tighten for a moment, poised to shove out and tip the man over the railing.

But he steps back.

“And that is why you are a fool.”

He leaves Xavier to catch his breath on the balcony.

\---

Erik fucks him that night against the wall of his bedroom. It is short, sharp and exactly what Erik needs. The blinds are drawn and Charles promises the neighbors to be so thoroughly involved in their own affairs that they think nothing of the noise.

For some reason, Erik finds that he enjoys seeing the red finger marks he leaves on Charles’ pale, English skin. He pins one arm above their heads and slaps the other away when Charles tries to jack himself off. He shivers and huffs in muffled gasps as Erik holds him still and pulls the orgasm out of him himself. But there is barely a instant for him to sag, to go limp against the wall before Erik is rutting into him, fast and hard, the pressure building, low in his belly, unable to hold on much longer, no, not a moment--! He comes deep inside and holds the little man tightly but only so he won’t fall when his knees shake and threaten to give way.

Later, he is spread out, looking smug on Erik’s bedspread. He smokes another cigarette and grins lazily as Erik watches him from the doorway of the bathroom. He has pulled his trousers back on when Erik went to flush away the evidence of their liaison. The English fussiness about modesty clearly forbids complete nudity in this situation. Apparently, these guidelines must be more flexible about the etiquette surrounding sodomy for Xavier has never demonstrated even a moment’s hesitation with stripping before sex. He’d even spoken about it once, back when they first began, asking if Erik wouldn’t be more comfortable during their fuck completely naked. Or, as he had put it at the time, “as G-d intended.”

Erik had told him to shut up and that G-d had nothing to do with it.

Now, Erik would like nothing more than to sleep. It has been a long day. Xavier has served his purpose. The orgasm has made his mind go quiet for the moment and he would like to take advantage of it while he can.

But now there is a funny little Englishman in his bed and he cannot seem to get rid of him.

“Don’t you need to work in the morning?”

Xavier yawns and stretches, arching his back and pointing his toes.

“But I’m just getting comfortable,” he whines and Erik frowns.

A snarl of suspicion works its way up his spine.

Coming over unannounced, inviting himself in for a meal, stealing his cigarettes… all these things Erik understands because they are the recognized and accepted prelude to sex. Erik understands what men are willing to do in pursuit of sex.

But all that is over now. He has been satisfied so why then this reluctance to leave? Why this protestation every time, why doesn’t he put his shirt back on, shake hands and leave? What else is he after, what else could he hope to achieve by remaining?

Erik cannot see the motivation and it bothers him. It bothers him as it has every time this has happened with Xavier, every time this silly man tries to worm his way into Erik’s space after they fuck…

“Mmm, you’re thinking too much, love. Come lie down.”

And he freezes, as though instantly identifying the slip he’s made. The mask has cracked at last.

“Get out,” Erik whispers. He is clinging to his control with even, measured breaths. He counts the bolts in the wallboard and thinks about the ones that would be the easiest to replace if needed for something else.

“Erik, I didn’t mean--”

“I said, _get out._ ”

“But I wasn’t--!”

The bed trembles as Erik grabs the screws holding the frame together. Xavier is on his feet, pulling on his shirt, doing up the buttons but he never looks away, like a deer wary of a predator, trying to keep it in sight.

When he finishes, he stands there, motionless for a moment. He opens his mouth, to protest, to put in one last feeble excuse, but, at the last second lets out a sigh instead. There is a flash of sadness and resignation crossing his face before he looks away. He carefully puts his hands in his pockets, bows his head and leaves.

And then Erik is alone again in the flat.

He hates this. He hates how his calm, his quiet is now stolen from him again. He locks the front door behind Xavier with a flick of his wrist and calls one of the pistols to him from the side table. He sits on the bed and breaks the thing down to components, again and again until his breathing evens out.

The thing he cannot understand is what the man wants from him.

He knows Xavier is dangerous. He knows he is hiding things and probably twisting things in his head. He read the Shin Bet file on him the moment the man turned up again. He knows Xavier is a hell of a lot smarter than he would like Erik to believe. He doesn’t just mean the fancy degrees, either. No, Erik can read well enough between the lines of the file that describe how Xavier was contracted as an “independent informant” by the British MI5 after he returned from Korea. He also knows that “service relationship permanently terminated” does not usually mean anything of the sort when dealing with a bright, moneyed, young man who just so happens to speak four languages (five, if he is generous and counts Hebrew,) have a distinguished military service record and be a terribly powerful telepath. No, Erik thinks, there are too many coincidences in this story that has Xavier “on vacation” in Cairo at the same time Erik was following a lead undercover with a group of dirty _kibbutzniks_ protesting something ridiculous in the same Egyptian city. Too much of a coincidence again that Xavier turns up in Tel Aviv under the auspices of working with a friend at the state-run psychiatric hospital several weeks later.

He confronted him about it, of course, when he first knocked on the door to his flat four weeks ago. Erik had pulled him inside immediately and pinned him to the ground with a knife at his throat. He remembers resolving, as soon as he saw the telepath at his door, to kill this man, this indiscrete little _fagala_ with the blue eyes who knew too much and could dance in and out of his head like it was nothing.

But it hadn’t gone that way. Not at all. And it wasn’t until he kissed Erik goodbye that the bite of suspicion had begun eating away at him again. If it was information he was after, why hadn’t he simply plucked it from Erik’s mind the moment they met and been done with it? Why the long charade, the drawn out farce? It couldn’t only be for the sex, could it?

It is this niggling question that keeps Erik anxious and awake for the rest of the night. He resolves to break off all association with Xavier the next time he comes foolishly knocking at the door and to do it quickly, before he has a chance to try any of his tricks.

\---

It is several weeks before Erik realizes Xavier has begun to sleep over.

He tells himself he doesn’t mind; if this is all Xavier wants from him, a warm body to share his bed, a prickly opponent to argue with, (another monster to analyze)… he cannot see a Sinister Master Plan in any of that and tells himself he doesn’t mind. The company he provides is… not unbearable.

Nor does it appear to be a tactical error to have Xavier in his home when he is asleep because, frankly, there isn’t much sleeping happening whenever he spends the night. There is the sex, of course, loud, raucous rounds of it that sometimes slam through both rooms of his tiny flat and leave broken furniture in their wake. For a stuffy Englishman, Xavier is unrepentantly hedonistic when it comes to sex. (That and endlessly creative and energetic.) Erik cannot remember ever having so much sex in such a short period of time and he finds himself sore some mornings in ways he has never experienced in his miserable, torturous life.

But more than that, there is the fact that neither of them seems capable of sleeping an entire night through. Between the two of them, Erik is burning through two packs of cigarettes a day. Most of these are smoked in silence in the wee hours of the morning. He fears he has now trained himself to need the nicotine to have any chance at sleep again after a dream rips him awake. Xavier, it appears, has already given up fighting the formation of a similar habit.

He is quiet when Erik finds him on the balcony at night. He taps his finger against the rail and rubs his temples and smokes but he does not speak. He hardly even acknowledges Erik when he joins him most nights. They each stand alone, as unlighted ships passing in the night, and breathe their nightmares out in clouds of smoke to fill the skies above Tel Aviv.

It is this nightly ritual, maybe, more than anything that has him relaxing around the Englishman.

Xavier, when he returns to bed first, does not wink at Erik or brush pass him too close as he would at any other time, but leaves him be on the balcony. Erik often finds himself retreating back inside soon after anyway.

Even in light of their growing closeness, it surprises him how easily Xavier manipulates him into being comfortable with his body. Lovers in the past (and it was unfair to call them that, there’d never been lovers, only whores and hustlers) had always told him it was unsettling, at the very least, the way Erik looks naked. There are scars gouged and puckered across his chest and back. They run down his legs and cross over bones that bow from malnutrition during the time when they were still being grown. He is missing three and a half toes, all told, some of the remaining little more than blackened stumps from the frostbite and gangrene. Then there is the swastika scorched into his chest, the rest of the firebrand’s eagle and lettering obscured by scar tissue and what remains of his left nipple. He always hated to be naked and to see the revulsion his body inspired in others. It was easier to keep his shirt on, his trousers firmly up when fucking to avoid any unpleasantness.

But in Cairo, when they’d first met, it had been too hot, too stuffy in the little tent they’d stolen from the _kibbutzniks_ to wear any clothes. Erik normally would have slept in the open air like the rest of them… if he’d had any interest in sleeping on that first night. In fact, he’d only given in to the indelicate advances of the sunburnt little Englishman-who-dressed-like-an-Arab in hopes of driving him off in horror at the sight of him uncovered. It would teach him to better restrain his curiosity, to stop meddling, if he saw the monster in the unforgiving flesh.

But it hadn’t worked that way.

They ended up rutting in the mud like pigs, Charles painting his chest with his mouth in a way far too intimate for a one-night stand. Even with Erik telling him to go away the next morning, he’d hung around until they decamped, whispering things about mutations and wanting to find more of _their_ people.

Now, Erik finds himself not pulling away when Charles tugs down his trousers fully to better suck him off. He forgets to bristle when he feels the man pushing fingers inside of him. He lets Charles teach him how it feels to be split open and why it is he always makes that particular noise when Erik is lucky enough to find that one, special angle. (He learns, too, what he sounds like making that same, particular noise.) He trembles with anticipation rather than anxiety on the day Charles announces, matter-of-factly, that he’s going to make Erik come without ever touching his cock.

In spite of all this, it confuses him the way Xavier sometimes clings to him in his sleep. He sometimes wakes tangled in the man’s limbs and has to breath slow and even to keep the itch to escape away. He reassures himself that he could throw Xavier off if he needed to. The man is fifteen centimeters shorter and nearly twenty kilos lighter! But sometimes his early-waking mind cannot always remember that in time. Xavier doesn’t ever say anything or even seem to mind too much when Erik cannot suppress the urge to throw him on the floor and get away.

\---

He has begun to speak of moving East. He tells Erik he is hearing things, _feeling_ things, about India, the way the Hindus are more primed to accept the supernatural and the inexplicable as a matter of course. He wants to find more of them, to bring them together, to build them as a people. He thinks he will find a better foothold for this in the East.

Erik tells him to go. His work here was only ever temporary, a favor to a friend. If he wants to move East, he should do it. Erik wishes him luck and prepares for the day Xavier will eventually shake the dust of the Holy Land from his sandals and move on. It will be a nice, tidy end to their episode, Erik tells himself. They can part on good terms and Erik can move on from this distraction. It has recently begun to make him nervous again (but for a different reason than before that he dares not try to articulate, not even to himself.)

He is not prepared, however, when Xavier asks him to come with him.

“Why the hell would I do that?”

Xavier looks at him with those big blue eyes and has the temerity to look surprised, as though it were he, Erik, who’d said something unexpected.

“Because… well, because I thought you’d like to come. With me. To find others like us.”

“I have no interest in finding others.” This is not strictly true. The idea of meeting other mutants intrigues, maybe even excites him, as much as it had when Xavier had first spoken of it back in Cairo but none of that is of any consequence. He doesn’t have time to go wandering around the world with Xavier.

“No? I thought maybe… considering everything we’ve talked about, that you might like to be there when we start building something together. A new culture, Erik, a new branch of humanity…! Don’t you have any desire to be part of something like that, something greater?” His cheeks are flushed with enthusiasm and Erik finds it within himself to ignore it.

“I am already part of something greater.”

“Oh,” and the color drains, realization dawning on his face. He looks away. “Oh, Erik. I’m so sorry, of course. That… that was tactless of me to suggest your work isn’t important. You are…” he smiles, wistfully. “You are truly a marvel. You are waging a crusade and accomplishing what Nuremberg could not, _would_ not. It would be… selfish of me to interrupt that,” he chews his lip. “I suppose… maybe you would want to join me after?”

“After?” Erik frowns. Is he deliberately being obtuse?

“After. After you finish with the Nazis. After Schmidt. After… oh.” And he has that wide-eyed look, the one that says he’s just picked up on something he’s managed to miss all these many months together.

“Erik, you… you haven’t thought at all about what you’re going to do after you finish with this, have you?” It is so innocent, Erik wants to laugh. He feels unsteady for some reason, uncomfortable as if Xavier has pressed too close to some secret even though he’s never been anything but direct about what his sole purpose for living has become.

“After? There is no ‘after,’ Xavier. I’m going to kill as many of them as I can before they kill me. It is very simple.”

“But, Erik, you make it sound as though you are working alone, that if you were to stop, no one else would take up the mantle--”

“I have a duty to act, it is the obligation, the payment of the survivor. I am to bring the drop of gall to the mouths of these monsters, it is what I am for!”

Erik is shaking then. He is counting the bolts in the ceiling joists to fight back the fog of hysteria and Charles is nodding, like he understands, like he has even an inkling of what he means—

“I understand! You are using your G-d-given gifts to bring them to justice--”

“Justice? Who said anything about justice!” He doesn’t understand and he will _never_ understand, this is his place, his only purpose for clawing his way from the depths of that frozen Gehenna, for enduring the screaming nightmares every night trying to drag him back--!

“Make no mistake, Xavier, this is not about Justice, it is Vengeance. It is not my place to bring Justice, only destruction and suffering!”

Plaster cracks as the joist above them shivers apart. The pans leapt from their cupboard, the silverware rattles in its drawers, he tries to focus to find a center to make it all still again but his thoughts are scattered through time, tugging him back to Auschwitz and Łódź, the marches through the snow, the suffocating heat of the ovens, the stench of scorching flesh—

And Charles is there, holding him tight in an embrace, anchoring him, shushing him as he tries to break free of the nightmare.

“You are so much more than that,” he murmurs while they rock together. “You are more than a golem forged from the muck of monsters’ sins.”

He can’t help but laugh at the ridiculous words and it rings wrong even to his own ears.

\---

He does not hear Charles leave in the morning but he tells himself it doesn’t bother him. He notices the letter left on the table but does not touch it. He goes to headquarters and fishes out a file of unfinished business. Then he returns home, packs his suitcase and dresses carefully while he waits for the cab to come take him to the airport. He ignores the driver when he tries to make small talk. He says nothing after the ticket agent has returned his passport and handed him his boarding pass. He does not think about the letter tucked into his breast pocket. He does not read it when he leaves his bag at the hotel in Zurich. He is not tempted by it as he stands inside the Nazi’s house, waiting in the evening dusk for the man to return home. It is only after, after he is wiping the blood from his shoes and driving away in the monster’s car that he feels compelled to pull over and unfold the letter. It is fitting that there are Latin letters on the page because, of course, Xavier was only ever a foreigner, a tourist, an imposter in the Holy Land.

“Thank you for letting me in. I think I’m going to miss you more than I intended.”

He finds it peculiar how such a little thing could clang so loudly inside his hollow chest.

\---

Time passes and Erik finds that he is uneasy and restless. When things begin to pick up in South America again, he volunteers for the project and leaves Tel Aviv at once. Once there, he gets lost in the work, trying to sort out the mess Harel and Aharoni have made of pulling Mengele out of the wind. It is looking hopeless for months until one day, in the heat of a Brazilian summer, Erik takes out a tooth and a Sympathizer coughs up a lead.

It is a small thing, barely more than a whisper, but a whisper is all Erik has ever needed. He even finds the magnanimity within him to tell his superiors what he has found before he leaves. This does not garner the gratitude he feels it deserves, but it is no matter because in three days, he has the pleasure of watching Josef Mengele’s eyes grow wide with recognition when he sees Erik walk into the room.

It took them 275 hours to work through Eichmann. Mengele only lasts 103 but this is mostly because Erik stands in the corner as the official interrogator reads through the charges. Menegele’s eyes never cease flicking back to him throughout the ordeal.

It’s clear he remembers Schmidt’s favorite pet project from the camps even without the use of a few of Erik’s favorite techniques to jog a recalcitrant memory.

Neither of them sleeps much through any of it.

Erik finds he is weary of it all, eager for it to finally come to an end.

When the _Todesengel_ finally whimpers all he knows about Schmidt’s location, Erik decides that this will be it, one way or another. He leaves them to their deliberations about what to do about smuggling Mengele out of the country and slips away for Argentina. No one asks where he is going. After all, no one worries about what happens to the golem when the time draws near to remove the Shem.

He follows Mengele’s words, pushing through his exhaustion, to a barman in a fly-bitten pueblo at the foot of a mountain. He feels taught like a bowstring, ready to snap with only the slightest twist of additional pressure but when he asks where to find the Foreigner, the man wastes no time pointing him up a winding path into the foothills. This, he tells him, is where the money comes from.

It is a silver mine Erik finds at that end of the path. A silver mine with a hundred sun-browned bodies splashing in the stream and wresting ore from the grips of the ancient Earth. Schmidt surveys his kingdom with the same satisfaction with which he used to watch the skies fill with human ash.

The magnetic signature of silver is weak at best but still the ground trembles when Erik takes hold. The people run, down the path, down the mountain and away from the monster molded from the frozen rock and ash.

When Schmidt sees him, he smiles. His mouth opens as if to say something but all Erik hears is a roaring in his ears.

 _Oh Azrael,_ someone says, _what took you so long?_

\---

It ends in the stream. Erik holds him under the surface and he flops like a fish until he does not. He does not know if he is dead or unconscious but it makes no difference. A blade is in his hands and he drags the body back onto the shore.

There he cuts the throat and lets the blood splash upon the ground. Some of it is Erik’s too and it is red and seeps into the cracks in the Earth, staining it dark.

He finds himself picking up fallen pine, piling it high upon the body, stacking it in rows like the corpses he used to fit together in the pits before he doused them in kerosene and lit the blaze. He lights it now and the fire licks away at the blood and flesh and the air fills once more with ash.

Erik goes away for a while after that.

\---

When he wakes, he is sitting on the ground by a bed of coals and embers. There are bones blackened by flames but otherwise intact at its center. It takes a heat greater than can be generated by a simple, wood-burning fire out in the open to burn through bone. This is something Erik knows no man should know but he does anyway.

His clothes are caked with blood and the sun has long-since tracked down the sky towards the horizon. He suddenly feels unclean in a way he has never felt before. He scrambles towards the stream and his joints pop and crack. He hisses at the pain from bruises (and maybe breaks?) he didn’t know he had until this moment but does not stop until he is standing in the stream.

He takes off his shirt and lets it float away along with his trousers and pants. His boots are stained so he leaves them in the stream and scrubs at his hands until they are raw.

When he finally emerges, he does something he has not done in what feels like decades.

There, by the stream, he begins to weep.

He sways in the way his mother and father taught him and beats his breast and bows his head. It’s been years since he’s prayed like this but he does it now without hesitation for there is nothing left to do.

He was never supposed to get this far.

_Oh G-d. What do I do now?_

There is, of course, no answer.

He goes away again then.

\---

This time when he wakes, there is a woman shrieking and several men shouting in Spanish and gesticulating to make their points. The fire and bones are nowhere in sight. Erik is wrapped in a rough blanket and someone pours water into him and tells him to sleep.

So he does.

\---

His superiors are furious when he returns. They wanted Schmidt alive. They wanted him alive to be made an example of and, if they couldn’t have that, they wanted him on a slab in their morgue to be poked and prodded and studied and _then_ made an example of.

Erik tells them they can have none of these things and then quickly collects his belongings into a single suitcase. He leaves the next night before they can think to do any of those things to him too.

He finds his way to England. To a school that smells like time and looks as though it has never and can never be touched by the tempests of war.

He asks for a man with a name he has not spoken in what seems a very long time.

He speaks with a woman who tells him that the man is no longer here, sadly, isn’t it a shame what happened to him? Such a tragedy, and for one so young and good-looking!

Erik keeps from bringing the ancient building down around them only because she is so quick to give him a forwarding address for some place in America.

So he goes to America and trips over his English and shouts at the idiots who look at him in the street and tears up the map they hand him at the airport because it doesn’t tell him immediately how to get to Westchester.

He has broken his rules about blending in, staying invisible in his hurry to get upstate but he doesn’t care.

He sleeps badly on the trains but it is better than being stuck, immobile in a hotel.

He finds a cab, a fat man in a car with grinding brakes and a paper sign pasted in the window that says “For Hire,” who says he can take him out to Greymalkin. Erik hopes he is telling the truth because he will probably end up killing the man if he has to hold himself together much longer. There are pieces of him breaking up everywhere, he can’t think for the noise in his head, he keeps seeing his hands covered in blood and the remnant of a familiar smile pasted on a rotting corpse, he is going to fail, to turn back into dust at any moment—

 _What took you so long?_ asks the voice.

Erik throws himself from the car and runs the rest of the way home.


End file.
